College of Liberal Arts and Sciences: Advising Handbook

B.A. Requirement

The foreign language requirement for the Bachelor of Arts degree is an all-university requirement; any student who takes a Bachelor of Arts degree at Northern Illinois University must fulfill the foreign language requirement by one of the means outlined in this section.
    In the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, three departments offer the B.A. degree as their sole baccalaureate degree option:
  1. English
  2. Foreign Languages and Literatures
  3. Philosophy
    The departments listed below in our college have curricula that lead to B.A. or B.S. degrees:
  1. Anthropology
  2. Communication:  Communication Studies; Journalism
  3. Economics
  4. Geography
  5. History
  6. Political Science
  7. Psychology
  8. Sociology
    To earn the B.A. degree, students must demonstrate competence in a foreign language equivalent to the level attained in two years of college instruction. This requirement may be met by one of the following:
  1. Four years of one foreign language with no grade lower than a C from an accredited high school.
  2. Successful completion of four courses (12 hours) of one of the two-year delivery languages (Chinese, French, German, Greek, Japanese, Latin, Polish, Russian, or Spanish) or two courses (10 hours) of the one-year intensive delivery languages (Burmese, Indonesian, Portuguese, Tagalog, Thai).
  3. Exemption (no credit earned) by one of the following means-
If a student has high school credit in a specific foreign language which he or she wants to continue studying at Northern and if there is a placement test for that language, the student must take the test to determine the appropriate level of placement. The student then registers for the course as directed by the placement examination; if the student places into Spanish 201, for example, the student may fulfill the B.A. foreign language requirement by completing FLSP 201 and FLSP 202.

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